For the risen son, the sunny ways beckon
Justin Trudeau buttoned his suit jacket, waved, flashed a thumbs-up and began to speak to his supporters Monday night at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.
The Liberals had won in a landslide, and the mood at the hotel was buoyant as Trudeau’s words spilled out in both official languages, beginning with a nod in French to the “sunny ways,” of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, before the prime minister-designate repeated the words in English.
“Sunny ways my friends, sunny ways,” he said. “This is what positive politics can do.”
Trudeau may be the new prime minister-designate, but Laurier is the original Mr. Sunshine. The phrase — “sunny ways” — became synonymous with his political style.
He was a compromise kind of guy, an approach he famously demonstrated in (sort of) resolving the Manitoba schools question in the 1890s. The question was about Thomas Greenway, the province’s anglo premier, and his decision to abolish public funding for Catholic schools. The move had a direct impact on Manitoba’s ever-shrinking FrenchCatholic minority, but was hugely popular among the province’s English-speaking majority. Meanwhile, in Ottawa, prime minister Sir Charles Tupper’s Conservatives said not so fast, Manitoba, and upheld funding. A deadlock ensued. Then along came Mr. Sunshine, speaking at an event in Morrisburg, Ont., in 1895, as official leader of the opposition.
Laurier used Aesop’s fable of The Wind and the Sun as a metaphor for the political mess between Ottawa and Manitoba. In the fable, the wind and sun are arguing over which was stronger. A traveller then appears on the road, and to settle their dispute the wind and sun decide to see which can get the traveller to remove his coat first. So the wind blows. And blows. And blows, and the traveller wraps his coat ever more tightly around himself, until the wind gives up and the sun takes a turn. Beating down, all hot and warm and cosy and nice, so that eventually the traveller discards the cloak.
“The government are very windy,” Laurier said in reference to Tupper’s Conservatives. “They have blown and raged and threatened, but the more they have threatened and raged and blown, the more that man Greenway has stuck to his coat.
“If it were in my power, I would try the sunny way. I would approach this man Greenway with the sunny way of patriotism, asking him to be just and to be fair, asking him to be generous to the minority ...
“Do you not believe that there is more to be gained by appealing to the heart and soul of men rather than to compel them to do a thing?”
What Laurier did next was win the 1896 election and settle the Manitoba school question with a compromise. In cases where there were enough Frenchspeaking Catholics to warrant funding, there would be funding.
He chose a sunnier path, and spent the next 15 years in power — a history lesson that did not appear to be lost on Trudeau campaign strategists 115 years later.